Comment by mattkevan

Comment by mattkevan 6 hours ago

25 replies

View on Hacker News

Ah Monotype. Knew before reading the article it would be them. Their whole MO is buying up smaller type foundries, massively increasing the licensing fees and shaking down the previous customers. They send in auditors, demand to see traffic data and threaten fines. Happened to me twice now.

Creating type is an extremely difficult and skilled discipline and designers deserve to be compensated fairly. However Monotype’s business practices are such that I won’t approve anything but open source fonts for new projects.

omnimus 5 hours ago

It's not Monotype but HGGC, private equity firm from Palo Alto that has bought Monotype and every other type foundry they can get their hands on. They likely have strategy to completely corner the market and then turn things up.

But as I wrote here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45973261#45977078 Besides open source fonts there still are stable high quality independent foundries that are safe to use as they would already be bought. (from comment above “Mostly swiss/european companies likes of Grilli type, Lineto, Dinamo, Klim type, Florian Karsten, Swiss typefaces… companies with often just few employees.”)

Reply View 6 replies
  • eloisant 5 hours ago

    Oh my god, private equity firms are such life-sucking vampires.

    Buy a great company, suck as much cash as they can before discarding the empty carcass.

    Reply View 2 replies
    • eurekin an hour ago

      I'd love to some deeper 60 minutes-like documentary about it. This perhaps might actually spark some legislation change

      Reply View 1 reply
  • mattkevan 4 hours ago

    Some really good options there. I did a deep dive a while back looking for small, independent, mostly European type foundries. There’s an incredible range of talent out there.

    Will never give Monotype and the like another penny.

    Reply View 0 replies
  • sdenton4 an hour ago

    Those independent companies can be eventually bought by PE and turned into more bombs, though, right?

    Reply View 1 reply
    • omnimus 16 minutes ago

      They indeed can but licensing on fonts from most companies is perpetual. Especially from the independent traditional ones. So its possible they might be bought in future but the new owner can't change license retroactively.

      Also there is very high chance they already got offer from HGGC and simply refused it, because some similar notably independent foundries got bought recently.

      Reply View 0 replies
mchusma 5 hours ago

Google fonts has about 2000 fonts with about 8000 total variations I believe. I pretty much refuse to believe that you can’t find the font you want there. Finding it is the hard part.

I saw multiple font discussions today. These are just variations on letters, there was some interesting stuff in the past but it’s over now. There should be no ip left, just remove all protections. The world won’t be worse off.

Reply View 11 replies
  • michaelt 5 hours ago

    When I select 'Japanese' on fonts.google.com the number of fonts drops from 1901 families down to 50. Selecting 'Hiragana and Katakana' raises the number to 81.

    That's still a lot of fonts, but it's not 2000. I guess designing a font for a language with 2100 different characters is probably a hassle.

    Reply View 8 replies
    • kouteiheika 3 hours ago

      > I guess designing a font for a language with 2100 different characters is probably a hassle.

      The ~2000 is the official count taught in schools, but the actually "commonly" used number in literature is around ~3000. And you actually want more than that, because people's names can use weird kanji which are used nowhere else.

      On the other hand, the vast majority of kanji are actually composed of a limited set of "subcharacters". For example, picking a completely random one:

          徧  ⿰彳扁
      The '徧' is composed of '彳' and '扁' arranged in a horizontal pattern. Unicode even has special characters (⿰,⿱,⿶, etc.) to describe these relationships.

      So this actually makes creating a CJK font somewhat easier, because you can do it semi-algorithmically. You don't have to manually draw however many thousand characters there are, but you draw those "subcharacters" and then compose them together.

      Reply View 3 replies
      • decimalenough 3 hours ago

        Has anybody ever actually implemented an algorithmically composed kanji font? Because it seems like a hugely complicated undertaking. There are rules of thumb for how characters are composed, but getting something aesthetically pleasing out of the end result is more an art than a science. Even Korean Hangul, which is way simpler, has all sorts of funky kerning rules.

        Reply View 1 reply
        • kouteiheika 2 hours ago

          Fully algorithmically? I have no idea, as I'm not really in the fonts business.

          But I'm pretty sure they're not actually redrawing every character from scratch, and are actually reusing the subcomponents (at very least for normal fonts). But how much of that is actually automated - you'd have to ask actual font designers.

          Reply View 0 replies
      • uasi an hour ago

        Although many kanjis can be algorithmically composed, manual adjustment of each character's shape is still necessary for production-grade fonts. For example, if you closely compare the 彳 radical between 徧, 行, and 桁, you'll notice subtle differences in width, stroke length, angle, and margin.

        Reply View 0 replies
    • Sardtok 4 hours ago

      I suppose you're counting the joyo kanji plus kana alphabets with diacritics. But the actual count of kanji is much higher, even if Japanese uses a relatively small number of characters for day-to-day writing.

      Pretty much every native university student I met when I studied there, had passed the Kanji Kentei level 1 test. A certification of proficiency in around 6000 kanji.

      Reply View 3 replies
      • michaelt an hour ago

        2100 I took from Wikipedia:

        > Japanese primary and secondary school students are required to learn 2,136 jōyō kanji as of 2010.[4] The total number of kanji is well over 50,000, though this includes tens of thousands of characters only present in historical writings and never used in modern Japanese.

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_writing_system

        Reply View 0 replies
      • rjh29 an hour ago

        They might have passed some level of the kanken (kanji kentei) in school but it is unlikely to be level 1. The gap between level 1 and 2 is ridiculous.

        Reply View 0 replies
      • decimalenough 3 hours ago

        Yeah nah imma call bullshit on that. Kentei 1 is notoriously difficult, only a few thousand people per year try it and the pass rate is single digits.

        Reply View 0 replies
  • Tor3 4 hours ago

    mchusma - the article specifically mentioned that this is about Japanese fonts, and being able to use fonts which look the same as they used to, in the games in question. And that getting other fonts is a) time consuming, b) needs testing, c), and if they look different they're talking about having to re-brand the whole game(s) in question. A big PITA, in any case. They're aware that it's possible to find an alternative, it's just that this is not easy to do quickly, and quickly enough to avoid the $20k penalty.

    Reply View 0 replies
  • RobotToaster 3 hours ago

    > These are just variations on letters, there was some interesting stuff in the past but it’s over now.

    I'm normally the last person to defend up, but there's some interesting stuff going on with svg fonts. I'm pretty sure there's only one or two true monoline fonts for instance.

    Also high quality ligature support is still not that common.

    Reply View 0 replies
Cloudef 35 minutes ago

Apparently they are planning to create their own machine learning model with all the font data they have gathered.

Reply View 0 replies
cyanydeez 40 minutes ago

Using the name of these companies instead of the private equity gouging ghouls who see everything we use as a potential choke point for being a rent-seeking vehicles is silly.

Reply View 0 replies
thaumasiotes 4 hours ago

> Creating type is an extremely difficult and skilled discipline and designers deserve to be compensated fairly.

Sure, if you need a custom font, you can pay someone to create it.

Once it exists, the creator has already been compensated fairly.

Reply View 3 replies
  • Ekaros an hour ago

    A font has approximately 6000 kanji characters. You could operate with some fraction of these. But still any reasonable time spend on each can add up to significant amount of hours. And you probably want this from reasonably skilled person and then add some review effort on top.

    Reply View 0 replies
  • mattkevan 2 hours ago

    What a wild take. Might as well ask why anyone should pay for anything once it's been made.

    While it's possible to commission a custom font and many companies do eg. Apple, IBM, Airbnb, Bytedance, Vercel, Github, Mozilla etc. Some even make them open source. However it's not really a viable option for anyone other than the largest organisations as it's far more expensive and time-consuming than just getting a licence unless your scale is such that a commission would be cheaper.

    Reply View 0 replies